A couple of years ago, a professor at my university had a very interesting thought exchange with the class I was in. We were a small group, and I knew most of them, they were my friends. Anyway, we had a talk about language purism - not an unimportant subject if you study English in The Netherlands.

I think Apple may be paranoid because last time they allowed clones, it was a disaster--they lost tons of money in hardware sales and weren't remotely able to make up for it in OS sales. The big difference is that today their OS runs on the same machines that run Windows, which means that theoretically they could have transformed the market overnight.

Ultimately though Apple decided to go the safe route and protect its hardware sales, with the knowledge that it was a surefire, instant way to profit--as opposed to the somewhat risky prospect of battling things out on Microsoft's own turf.

Agreed but thinking of the number of hardware + software platforms there were BBCs, Acorns Be+BeBox etc linking your hardware to your software seems risky.

MS has shown that selling an OS can make you a rich and powerful company and certainly the profits aren't scraps.

Now Apple sells a a very good OS but artificially linked to it's own hardware which is basically the same as every one elses. This looks risky to me especially when it had the opportunity to be the major OS vendor.

MS has shown that selling an OS can make you a rich and powerful company and certainly the profits aren't scraps.

What Microsoft did was a once-in-history trick which will not be repeated soon. They entered the market at just the right time, took advantage of a particular set of circumstances in the history of personal computing, eliminated competition and maintained their position with a series of ruthless, underhanded and sometimes downright illegal moves. They've managed to build a monopoly which has survived for almost 2 decades but which is now a dinosaur and cannot survive as it is. They're facing fierce competition on every front (browsers, operating systems, game consoles, handhelds, office suites, search engines, server applications etc.), not to mention that everybody has gotten wiser to their schemes and has seen the benefits of FOSS.

Microsoft's trick will not be copied. Building marketshare slow and steady the way Apple is doing is a much better and safer way of going about it.